• Leafeytea@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Western media could start by grounding their information in less Islamophobic rhetoric for one.

    I mean, I am certainly not a scholar of Islam, but I do know enough about it to understand that at least for Sunni Muslims, the actions taken by terrorists like Hamas are not condoned or supported. Too much misinformation in the West about mainstream Islam’s position on “Jihad” is also severely missing, and in the end we end up with extreme interpretations being touted as part of the central tenets of the religion and nothing but assumptions that ALL Muslims are anti-everything-not-Muslim and ready to kill us all at any moment. This is categorically false.

    For another, not ALL Palestinians are Muslim. Christian Palestinians have been systematically victimized by Israel’s policies every bit as much as their Muslim brothers. For decades now, thousands of them have seen themselves forced to flee Gaza and the West Bank to other countries just survive. So it does get really irritating when you see arguments in Western media squarely blaming Islam or anti-Christian hate for the extremism of terrorist groups like Hamas when clearly, there have been (and continue to be) Israeli governmental pressure and policies in place to discriminate and displace any Palestinian, regardless of them being Muslim or not.

    But you know, to talk about any of these facts means you are anti-Semitic so… it doesn’t happen anywhere outside of academia basically. Infrequently at that.

    • raccoona_nongrata@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Agreed, but also importantly; one doesn’t need to support Islam as an ideology, or Judaism (the religion) in order to side with muslims who are suffering or israelis who are suffering etc. It’s very much contextual and about which groups have power in a given context.

      I am, philosophically, very opposed to all the Abrahamic religions, but I will still argue for the rights and humane treatment of muslims in countries where they are a minority under the thumb of other groups and vice versa. For example, in the US there is an evangelical christian hegemony, which leads to frequent struggle with islamophobia, but also it is vice versa for Islamic majority countries.

      So depending on the context, I might argue the cause of one or the other in regards to their rights to live and worship without oppression, because none of it is worth degrading people’s humanity or right to live a peaceful life even though we frequently see the ideologies themselves serve as catalysts for systems of oppression.